Google LLC and Cisco Systems Inc. today announced a push to build broad new integrations between their products that will give enterprises the ability to manage on-premises and public cloud network centrally.

The product integrations will be delivered in the form of an offering dubbed Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud. Cisco and Google are aiming to make it generally available in the first half of 2021.

The challenge the partnership seeks to address is that hybrid cloud workloads require consistency between the on- and off-premises components of a company’s infrastructure. An on-premises financial database that needs low latency, for instance, would have the same requirement if it were to be migrated to Google Cloud. But replicating on-premises network settings in the cloud can be complicated because the environments are different. 

Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud is aimed at easing the task. According to the companies, enterprises will gain the ability to use the Cisco software with which they manage their on-premises wide-area networks to manage their Google Cloud as well. Settings and security rules that administrators configure for the on-premises network will be applied to the cloud. 

That synchronization will be carried out with the help of Google’s Cloud Service Directory. It’s a kind of bulletin board that allows an application to make its technical requirements known to other services and tools, which can use the information to make adjustments.    

In the case of Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud, the offering will provide the “ability to define the intent of how the network should treat those services in an automated fashion, reducing time to onboard new services on to the network,” Google Cloud networking head Shailesh Shukla wrote in a blog post.

“The platform will enable businesses to optimize application stacks by distributing application components to their best locations,” Sachin Gupta, the head of product management for Cisco’s intent-based networking business, detailed in a blog post of his own. “For example, an application suite could support a front end running on one public cloud to optimize for cost, an analytics library on another cloud to leverage its AI/ML capabilities, and a financial component running on-prem for optimal security and compliance.”

The partnership builds on Cisco’s and Google’s earlier efforts to make their products work better together. Separately, Cisco has worked with Google rival Amazon Web Services Inc. on a similar integration, allowing enterprises to extend network settings to their AWS environments.

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, told SiliconANGLE that this is big news for Google and Cisco customers, since his research show that more than 80% of businesses have adopted hybrid cloud or plan to.

“The challenge of moving to a hybrid cloud is ensuring consistency of performance, availability and security across the private and public clouds,” Kerravala said. “The joint announcement between Cisco and Google creates a single wide-area network that spans from the enterprise premises into the Google cloud. Now IT professionals can create a single security or application policy and have that be consistent regardless of where the application component, workload or user is.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Google